one—circles within circles—each smaller and more exclusive than the last. The object of the huge game of life over here seemed to be to keep the great mass of those whom they regarded as commonalty out of any one of the circles, while striving individually each to climb into the one next above, and more contracted. The most maddening thing of all was to find his grave, dignified mother drawn in and made a partaker in this meaningless strife.
Still essentially an outsider, David could look with larger vision—the far-seeing vision of the western land, the hilltops and the dividing sea,—and to him now the circles seemed verily the concentric rings of the maelstrom into which events were hurrying him. Would he be able to rise from the swirling flotsam and ride free?
The deeper philosophy underlying it all he as yet but vaguely understood; that the highest good for all could only be maintained by stability in the commonwealth; as the tremendous rock foundations of the earth are a support for the growth thereon of all perfection, all grace and beauty; that the concentric rings, when rightly understood, should become a means of purification—of reward for true worth—of power for noblest service, and not for personal ambition and the unmolested gratification of vicious tastes.
David did not as yet know that his clear-seeing wife could help him to the attainment of his greatest possibilities, right here where he feared to bring her—the wife of whom he dare not tell his mother. Blinded by the world's estimates which he still had sense enough to despise, he did not know that the key to